From the blog

And after 69 rather long, frustrating and somewhat infuriating days of a much anticipated wait … HABEMUS INTERNET! Yes!! You are reading it right. After nearly 2.5 months of waiting for Movistar to, finally, get their act together, I am now, at long last, properly online through my regular landline and its corresponding ADSL connection. I know this may sound a bit silly and everything, but, boy, I am just such a happy camper. Excited, even, to no end like a young kid in a candy store for the first time not knowing exactly where to start just yet, as I get to witness how 2015 can now begin for yours truly with today as my first official day back at work.

Relief. Much relief.

That was my initial feeling last Friday afternoon, when the local technician came along to patch things together one final time before I was back in business. And what a journey it has been all along! I am not too sure I will be very willing to go through it again at some point in time, specially, since it has been everything but pleasant. Everything but delightful. Nonetheless, if there is anything that this whole experience has taught me over the course of weeks is to embrace the opportunity of highlighting how key and fundamental for an overall excelling client experience would be the whole notion of ownership. Allow me to explain …

Once upon a time, on November 7th 2014, to be more precise, I moved out to a new place, right in the city centre of Playa del Inglés, (Gran Canaria) 3rd largest city in the Canary Islands during high season, thinking that I’d be much better connected to the Internet in order to be able to carry on with my knowledge Web work. Wishful thinking, I suppose. I mean, how naïve can someone be to expect that if you go to a much larger city you are bound to assume to have better, faster, cheaper Internet connection. No, not going to happen. Not likely if the ISP is Movistar.

During the course of the following 67 days (Yes! 67 days!) a lot of things happened in the mean time that, if anything, only helped increase my frustration and rage to levels I have never experienced over the course of the last 18 years I have been online and in multiple cities and countries, as I witness how every day that I was not online I kept losing an opportunity to generate some more revenue, resulting, in the long run, to having lost three (potential) clients along the way. If you have been reading this blog for a little while now you may have read already the couple of blogposts I have put together on the topic. This entry is the follow-up one to them all as on the 67th day something happened.

I got to talk to a human. For the first time. And it was weird, because he wasn’t even a Movistar employee but a sub-contractor from Montelnor who was basically just as surprised as I was for being the first person I talked to face to face and who pretty much showed up where I live as his boss told him they were running out of time on the complaint I apparently raised (I don’t recall having made such claim in the first place, so probably someone did it for me, after nothing happening for 67 days in a row, who knows…) and therefore they needed to act. And pronto! I was in trouble. Big trouble as he kept explaining how the place where I now live was not wired at all and the telephone box was a complete mess. And it certainly was! I saw it and too bad I didn’t think of taking a picture to see the messy situation of how this particular telco looks into the whole concept around maintenance of infrastructure. Or the lack of, better said. What a real mess!

According to this technician’s words I was in trouble, because the place where I now live was not wired and that was beyond his control. Nothing he could do or influence to make the necessary adjustments. The local technical service from the complex where I live needed to patch me up instead, apparently, according to his colourful commentary.

Meet Frank. Although not his real name, he is the guy from the technical service. A quick short visit, an explanation of the problem I have, a fast and rather thorough look here and there at where the problem was and off he goes! Bang! On to solving the problem.

Next morning, while I was working at a friend’s home stealing, once again, their wifi, so I could meet up a couple of clients I will be visiting this week in Madrid, he shows up with one other technician from the same subcontractor company and before I could blink on my way back home the whole house is fully wired and ready to go! Whoahhh! What a difference owning your customer’s problem makes!

The next day, the subcontractor technician who was there the day before worked out the final piece of magic and after a couple of hours fiddling here and there the landline gets installed, and I FINALLYhave got an Internet connection. And the nightmare is, at long last, over! 69 long days are now a thing of the past! Yay!! No, wait, DOUBLE yay!!

Needless to say that Frank did a superb piece of job (and got a lovely tip as a result of that!) in showing and demonstrating first hand to both the Movistar and Montelnor (the subcontractor company) technicians and customer service / support teams one of the fundamental traits of delivering a delightful client experience, regardless of whom the client may well be: no matter what, as the service provider, you always own your customer’s problem. No exceptions.

And that is essentially where both Movistar and Montelnor failed big time to deliver. They never even attempted a single time to own my problem (i.e. the transfer of a landline and ADSL from my old home to my new one, never mind the additional services contracted and already paid for, like Fusión, which I am still waiting for it to be completed, by the way!). Yes, I know, I am one of the 22 million customers Movistar has, but it is of no excuse really to make a single customer wait for nearly 2.5 months before having their needs or business problem(s) solved. And that’s what total ownership of your customer’s problems is all about: becoming responsible and accountable for your client’s needs and wants, something that Frank understood really well right from the beginning and who within the course of a single day got everything sorted out. Flawlessly and in a heartbeat and always keeping me in the loop of what was happening so I would know the due progress just as it happened.

Why can’t companies that claim to be customer centric get this? Why can’t companies that keep claiming they work really hard on providing excelling client experiences, but fail to deliver, become more accountable and responsible for putting actions behind the (useless) marketing words they utter all over the place time and time again? Plenty of people out there keep saying how we are entering the age of the most personalised, individualised and customised client experiences than ever before, yet it’s got to be Frank, who has been working as technical service for over 35 years, the one who keeps demonstrating on a day to day basis what owning your customer’s problems is all about becoming more customer centric, more accountable and responsible for your work and eventually more human.

Why can’t companies become more like Frank? Why can’t companies become more human by showing more empathy and engagement when dealing with their customer’s problems? Why can’t Movistar be one of them?

Movistar, are you really listening? I hope you are, because otherwise I think you may have just lost another customer …

PS. Oh yes, the picture I have shared above, as part of this blog entry, is the actual speed test I did right after I got connected the Web through ADSL and, I know what you may be thinking… gosh, it’s awfully slow for today’s standards, I suppose! Well, yes, it certainly is! But I guess it’s better to have such speeds than having no Internet at all, like I have just gone through for nearly 2.5 months! But it gets better, because once again Movistar failed short on the expectations raised, because when I first moved to this new place I was advised I would be enjoying speeds of up to 10 Mbps download (Not lightning fast either, but a minor improvement!) and instead this is the current speed I’m getting and it won’t go any way further up at this point time at all. So I better get used to it, I was told. The alternative would be rather ugly.

Fibre. What about fibre?, you may say, right? Well, according to this very same technician from Montelnor I can just simply forget about it, because by the time it arrives right where I live, right in the city centre, I will probably be bored by then… Talking here of waiting times for over a year or much longer, IF we are lucky! Arrrggghhh

We will just have to wait and see… I guess, in the mean time, I can get to enjoy the current speeds from my 3G / 4G mobile phone:

I suppose this is the current rather appalling and extremely poor state of things of a telco / ISP infrastructure like Movistar’s, where the local 3G / 4G speeds of your mobile device are FOUR times faster than the regular fast ADSL line back at your home place. As Benjamin Zandler would probably say, “How fascinating!”

Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

Here I am, once again, incredibly frustrated and very irritated I got disconnected from the Internet last week Friday, as I blew up my monthly data allowance on my mobile phone for the zillionth time over the course of last few weeks. I got a bit tired of asking friends to use their wifi again and again, so I could continue with my day to day work routines, never mind as well embarrassing myself showing up at a local coffee shop time and time again while the monthly bill keeps getting more and more expensive with all of the additional beverages. Oh well, one more week to go… Indeed, one more week to go before Movistar finally shares some mercy upon myself and decides to treat this customer with some decency by hooking up both my landline and ADSL connection after nearly 2.5 months of much anticipated wait. I just can’t count the days anymore…

Indeed, I just can’t count the days after having endured such level of sheer incompetence and utterly appalling customer service while earlier on today I had a chance to reflect and muse on a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine, back at the beginning of 2014, as I was just getting started with my new adventure as an independent advisor around Social Business and Digital Transformation where we talked, rather extensively, about what it is like being a freelancer in today’s more complex than ever working environment.

I trust his judgement quite a bit, since he has been a freelancer himself in the IT industry for over 35 years and still going strong, so when we, finally, had a chance to talk through Skype, I knew it was going to be a rather intense, massively entertaining, hugely enlightening and incredibly helpful learning experience. And, boy, it surely was! We talked about lots of things about what to expect and what not, about what may work and what may not. We talked extensively of what it is like living in this brave new world of uncertainty and make the most out of it, but if there was a single point of discussion I truly cherished (even to today) as one of my key learning highlights from 2014 was the subject of who my new boss would be from there onwards, now I was no longer a salaried employee at a large big corporation.

We had a good laugh when, as we got started with that conversation, I mentioned to him how in my last project with my former employer at one point I had up to 11 different management lines before I could reach out to the top, that is, the CEO of the company. And of those 11 different bosses I often found myself having to report to several chains of command to keep them in the loop of what I was doing for my day to day work. Never mind how things would have been much much different if they themselves would have been working out loud, narrating their work (just as I was!), instead of being stuck in their own email Inboxes. Oh well, that’s a story for another blog post coming up on the incredibly inspiring and rather refreshing egalitarian power of social networking tools in helping knowledge workers ignore the hierarchy, flatten the organisation in order to get work done more effectively.

The thing is this good friend of mine mentioned how, despite the uncertainty that will be now part of my daily life, plenty of things will become a lot simpler in terms of figuring out who my new boss may well be from there onwards. The only one I would need to pay attention to. A surprising and rather refreshing change even, because, in his words, my new boss as a freelancer and independent advisor is no longer my organisation, whatever that may well be, as the traditional hierarchy disappears into thin air since that artificial construct is no longer needed, nor relevant. My new boss is not going to be my fellow peers / colleagues / social networks or what not, not even perhaps the so-called influencers in the market, vendors, analysts, business partners and whatever other groupings, but, eventually, and right to the heart of the matter, my boss would be the one and only to care for and delight to no end: my customer(s).

Wise words, indeed. Who would have thought about that, right? I mean, if you go out there and ask a few people to tell you who their boss is I bet “My customer(s)” is probably going to be the very last answer you are most likely going to hear. And yet it’s the only one that we should be caring about. The only one that matters. The one we all keep coming back to work for every morning doing what we love doing: serving our clients with a delightful experience and, of course, in a timely manner.

Right at that moment, while we were still conversing and enjoying very much the ongoing dialogue, I realised that sentiment of my customer(s) as my new boss(es) will become my new mantra ever since I went independent and I have never gone back. As a result, and almost after a year going by, I have had the enormous privilege and true honour of having worked with some pretty amazing and rather smart clients who throughout our interactions in 2014 (and beginning of this year already!) have helped me grow not only in a professional level, but also on a personal level. Who knew?

Who knew that bosses / managers could have that effect on you? Who knew that perhaps in the traditional big corporate world we may have had the wrong end of the stick all along? I mean, how many of you folks out there would consider your immediate boss today your customer and not the individual you are directly, or indirectly, reporting to? I am certain not many. The thing is that you may be thinking that since you don’t have an external job to focus on, specially if you are not in sales or marketing, you really don’t have any customers to worry about, as you may be working in internal projects. But how about if we got it all wrong right from the beginning? You see? We are all providing a service, whether internal and / or external, and as service providers everyone that we are serving then becomes our customer and therefore our new boss. Imagine if we could all get to ignore everything else and just focus on the customer as your new manager.

Well, here I am thinking what that may have been like over the course of the last 2.5 months when I first requested a service from Movistar where I wanted to transfer my already existing landline and ADSL I got contracted with them and move it to my new home place, 10 minutes away from the old one. As a service provider you would expect they would go the extra mile for their new boss to provide him with a delightful experience, don’t you think? Yet, apparently, they have been looking elsewhere, inwards, stuck in their paperwork, without resources, providing everything but a delightful client experience. More of a nightmare, if I may add. And perhaps that’s been part my fault as well for not stressing out deep enough the impact I have been suffering from their disservice, as I have no longer been able to carry on with my day to day knowledge Web work activities, losing several opportunities already of incoming revenue in the last two months and still counting…

Last week Friday I cancelled one of the many services I had contracted with Movistar for a good few years. Perhaps that’s how I should have made myself heard right from the start vs. patiently awaiting for them to look outside vs. inwards. It won’t be the last one. Currently, I am compiling the various different services I have got contracted with them and over the course of the next few days / weeks / months I will be terminating each and every one of them. I guess I will be firing them all away! I have been saying for a good while now how employee disengagement is a rather serious business problem to tackle in today’s corporate world. Mostly induced by disengaged managers, if you look deep enough into it beyond the initial marketing hype currently going on.

So when your loyal customer, i.e. your new boss, actively disengages away from you by cancelling service after service, due to your rather poor and devastating skills about proper customer service, I guess it’s time now for you to figure out what’s happening, look around, go outside, engage in a meaningful conversation where you can work harder to solve their business problem(s) and see how you may be able, perhaps, to re-engage them back. If ever. If you still care, that is.

The clock is ticking… It has been already for a good few weeks and this customer, yours truly, is just about to have enough of being your boss really, my dear Movistar. Thus, what do you think? Time for us to depart ways and move on? Well, it’s up to you… Like I said, the clock is ticking and I just might be waiting for your response to re-engage me back. You know what needs to be done and, this time around, in case you may not have noticed it, there is a deadline.

Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

Today is, officially, my first day at work for 2015 after the Christmas holidays. I am writing officially on purpose, because after 61 days I am still waiting for Movistar (That Queen Between that always wants to get paid, but fails to deliver on customer service big time!) to come by my new place and install both the landline and the ADSL connection, so I can resume my knowledge Web work I have been forced to put into a halt for over 2 months now. Latest news I have from the fire extinguishing community management team at Movister_es on Twitter is that they will finally make an appearance (or so I am hoping!) on January 16th. Yet no-one from the technical team has contacted me to confirm that appointment. Instead, they seem to have mastered the skill of lying to this customer left and right throughout all of that time to the point where, at long last, it will have a price to pay: my loyalty.

Or, perhaps, even worse, my trust. After all, how can I ever possibly trust my local telco / ISP again for helping me carry on with my job as an independent freelancer (autónomo, in Spain), working remotely from his home office, when they have locked me down for all of this time without a single apology or concern about the huge impact they have incurred upon this family where I am the solely source of income at the moment. And, instead, they take the route of lying day in day out as it is their business as usual modus operandi. It’s always been.

From 5 to 20 days to get it all sorted out, initially, to another 5 to 20 days to finally get it done and dealt with, to December 29th, to now January 16th (Perhaps?), all along I have been told they would make it all happen relatively fast. Yet, 61 days later I am still waiting… But that’s not the worst bit of it all, because earlier by mid-November last year I got a phone call (One of the many pointless interactions I have had so far!) from a rather helpful and supportive lady telling me they have acknowledged the request to transfer the phone / ADSL line and that it will be taking place by mid-January.

Yes, MID-JANUARY 2015!! So why bother with all the lying to this loyal, faithful 11 year long customer over the course of weeks through regular Twitter Mentions & DMs, phone calls, SMS messages and what not if right along from the start *you* knew exactly when it will all be addressed and fixed and since it was going to take over 2.5 months of rage, angst, impatience and unsettling unhappiness all around for yours truly I guess it was better to lie to this customer in order to tame the frustration. Bollocks!

Let me tell you something, my dear Movistar, if you keep claiming you happen to be a people to people business, i.e. a successful Social Business, one who cares about their clients and their needs, about your own employees and their well being, one who aims at changing the landscape of B2C (if there ever was such a thing like that!), one who simply cares, there is one little thing you may want to add to your vocabulary from now onwards: never lie to your customers. Be willing to engage in a two-way, meaningful, open, transparent conversation where you are willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of your already appalling customer service, so that you might be able to spark that sentiment of empathy you now have long lost from yours truly, because you just weren’t ready to face the reality: you are everythingBUT a social business. Sad state of things, really, if you can’t handle the simple fundamentals of what it is like being an Open Business through openness, trust and authenticity.

Yes, it’s going to take me about 2.5 months to get back on track and be connected to the Internet, once again, thanks to you, Movistar. In the mean time, I can tell you I have gone through some rather interesting and colourful times that will make me remember you not very fondly for a long while, but, right now, there is just something out there for you to worry about quite a bit more: my trust in you and your services, because if you cared about your customers and keep aiming at building one’s trust in you, I can now confirm you have totally lost mine and it will take you a substantial amount of time AND effort to repair it.

I know for sure though you won’t even think a single time in investing your always lacking resources. Why should you, right? After all, who am I? I am just A customer. One of the many millions you keep saying you are serving to the point of delight, but fail quite remarkably at it time and time again by ignoring their own needs and wants, just because you feel we should be obliged to you for offering the service of being connected to the Internet. According to you, it should be our privilege to be your customer, like we owe it to you, but, alas, you know what?, at this point in time, that trust and loyalty from yours truly you have accumulated over the course of over a decade is now lost and long gone forever to the point where you will now become a primer example of what a so-called social business should not be doing at all. You are the perfect case of the anti-social business mindset. Your weakness? Not the lack of resources, nor the lack of customer service skills and know-how while trying to fix your customers’ problems, but something much more fundamental and key to every single Open Business: never *ever*lie to your customers.

Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.